What I Learned from Executing Two Men | Hacker News Reader

What I Learned from Executing Two Men

nytimes.com

203 pointspmcpinto297 comments

The difficulty with trying to argue down the death penalty is that you end up arguing on so many levels.

This article mentions the dollars and cents expense of the death penalty; this is an empirical fact, either it is cheaper to execute someone or cheaper to imprison them.

This article mentions the ineffectiveness in protecting society; this is also an empirical question, although it is harder to measure than the monetary cost.

Finally, the article speaks of the emotional and moral cost to those employed to carry out the execution.

But the article only devotes a single sentence to the core of the argument, at the very beginning: the author has come to believe that life is either hallowed or not, and he prefers to believe that it is always hallow, and killing always wrong.

This is the core of the problem. Some people believe killing is always wrong. Some people believe justice requires the execution of those convicted of a capital crime. Heck, sometimes these contradictory beliefs are held by the same person.

All the other arguments don't matter. If killing is always wrong, you pay the cost of life imprisonment and don't execute people to save money. If justice requires a life for a life, you don't scrimp on that, either. You pay whatever monetary, emotional, and moral costs are necessary for justice to be done.

This is an excellent point, and I think much of the same principles apply to the abortion debate a well.

Not really. People will always get abortions and in some cases really need them. No-one forces the government to execute people.

Would you be ok with permitting murder on the basis "people will always do it."?

Because if you take the arguments of pro-life advocates on good faith, that's what you're saying. You can't make your case against position by ignoring the underlying reasons people hold it.

I would offer yet another point of view: people are generally so inept, that if it is justice one wants, a death penalty should be avoided since the chances of someone being wrongly condemned are quite likely.

So, is it so important that the guilty are snuffed out that one is ready to accept collateral damage in the form of innocent being put to death.

We could apply the same logic to life imprisonment. An innocent person forced to endure the absolute horror or life imprisonment -- I would rather die.

What's the difference? Dead or locked in a horrible box for life? We euthanize sick cats; we don't make them suffer needlessly. I would argue life imprisonment is a punishment more severe than death.

Just by way of disclosure, I have witnessed two executions in Texas back when I worked for Reuters. I spent a lot of time on death row, interviewing prisoners as well as families, so I don't have a positive feeling about the death penalty... however I contend that life inprisonment is even worse.

If you're imprisoned for years and then found to be actually innocent, you can go home. That can't happen if they already chopped your head off.

No you can't - because your home no longer exists, and I don't just mean bricks and mortar.

You can however, make a new home.

The emotional damage makes that hard.

Hard is better than impossible.

But the world has moved on, you have no employable skills, there is stigma still attached to having been inside... And the compensation is a paltry amount and you will be billed for your food and accomodation while inside (yes really).

Then you can kill yourself. But you undeniably have more freedom and opportunity than a dead person.

...you will be billed for your food and accomodation while inside

That's a bill that probably won't get paid. What are they going to do, throw me in prison?

I believe it gets extracted before you get your compensation paid.

That is so awful on so many levels. "Hey, we kept you locked up against your will, but you did eat our prison food, so we're going to take that out of the money we should be paying you for imprisoning the innocent".

It's awful, yes, but I can kind of see the logic behind it. Barely.

> And the compensation is a paltry amount

Then that's what should be fixed, isn't it? The amount should be substantial enough to a) be a significant deterrent for future screwups and b) support the former prisoner indefinitely.

"however I contend that life inprisonment is even worse"

Possibly that's an appropriate punishment then, for the very worst of offenders.

I honestly think that life imprisonment is an atrocity. Long-term imprisonment in general is a racket, too: what difference is there really between an eleven- and a twelve-year sentence? Why does every inmate automatically start off with ⅔ of his sentence, and then get extra days added for bad behaviour?

I think above a few months, imprisonment probably isn't the answer. We should explore alternatives: corporal punishment (wouldn't you rather a single lash than a year in prison?), fines, slavery (why not make someone who commits manslaughter work for the victim's family for a decade, rather than sit in prison for a decade?) and, yes, execution (which is, I contend, more humane than long-term imprisonment).

I don't really know what the answer is, but I'm pretty certain it doesn't involve years of prison.

Couldn't community service be viewed as a form of slave labor? (not literally, but to an extent)

> Couldn't community service be viewed as a form of slave labor? (not literally, but to an extent)

I think it literally is, which is why I think requiring it in order to graduate from high school or college is uncouth and unconstitutional (likewise, the draft).

I have no problem with it as a punishment for crime, although I do have concerns about the efficacy and efficiency of how it is administered. Does it make sense for someone with high-value skills to be cleaning toilets as community service?

I was not saying that the justice system should avoid pain to the guilty but rather work on a principle of least harm. If a person has slain several people, and it is likely he will do so again, society might be better off with the person locked away. A life imprisonment can be, if not canceled, then terminated and amended financially.

It of course depends on the nature of the prison. I would claim it could be just like a regular apartment - except you can't leave. There is no reason for it to be doomy , gloomy and grimy if the raison detre is to protect the society from the person locked away.

I think norway's treatment of prisoners is great example of how to do this as sensibly as possible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Norway

One of the major purposes of prisons is deterrence, and for that prisons need to be awful.

In theory, harsh prison conditions deter would-be criminals.

Do you have any evidence that reality conforms to this theory?

>>Do you have any evidence that reality conforms to this theory?

Do you have any evidence that reality doesn't conform to this theory?

Not a counter-question just for the sake of counter-questioning; I am sincerely interested in knowing.

The US has harsh sentences and high crime.

Is it possible we would have higher crime with lighter sentences?

This in itself doesn't prove anything. Compared to what it's harsh and high? e.g. China may have harsher sentences and lower crime.

While longer prison sentences do deter crime up to a point ( http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2016/03/criminal...) I've not seen any data that would grade effectiveness of prisons based on their awfullness. No matter how "cushy" the prison environment is, it's still a prison. Awful prisons only dehumanize convicts and guards alike for no purpose.

Why not make it a choice for the prisoner to make then? Perhaps we could have life in prison by default, but make humane state-assisted suicide available at any time.

People are quick to argue that a life sentence can be reverted with the underlying assumption that all damage is reversed.

I don't buy this for an instant.

Well, the point is not necessarily that it can be reversed. The point is that society takes the stand that taking a human life, no matter how debased, is barbarous. Of course, this takes us to euthanasia and abortion territory, so we could modify this by saying that taking a human life without a deathwhish and consent is barbarous - just as prolonging life beyond a certain point.

A good example of a candidate for life imprisonment is a mass murderer who has obviously shot tens of peoples without any remorse and boasts doing it again. The crime is not debatable - the question then remains - how should a society respond to such a situation.

This was in response to the specific argument that life sentences can be reversed, which I don't think constitutes a strong argument.

Ah, yes now I see your point. I agree, it confounds the discussion.

You don't see a difference between "it's ten years later and we are going to free you, sorry" and "it's ten years later and you're dead, sorry"? Neither is good enough, of course, but one is still a hell of a lot better.

The argument isn't that a life sentence can be fully reversed, just that it can be modified later, which death cannot be.

I do see the difference, but I'm not convinced it's anything but marginal.

A ruined life isn't much better than death, and sometimes worse IMHO. Without wanting to throw around accusations (truly! I don't mean to presume anything about you, specifically!), I find that people who make your argument often have no appreciation of just how terrible a ruined life can be. I think it's critical to remember that there can be no suffering after death, and while I'd still rather rot in prison than hang for a crime I didn't commit, there's no question that imprisoning an innocent person will cause tremendous suffering and debilitating handicap.

To be clear: there are other, stronger arguments against capital punishment. My point is rather that this one isn't the strong argument it's often made out to be.

I think people who have been freed after decades in jail have very different humble opinions. There are plenty of documentaries and articles and books on that subject if you're interested.

Yes, I'm reasonably well-read on the subject. I don't deny that these people do exist. Rather, I argue that the "killing is worse than perpetual imprisonment because the later can be rescinded" argument is weak.

This is because either way, people's lives are being ruined. There are a great many people who have been freed from jail only to continue suffering on the outside as a direct result of their incarceration.

Incidentally, I think you've made some assumptions about my position on capital punishment that are mistaken...

EDIT: I seem to have been unclear and this is causing a lot of visceral reactions. Yes, it's worse to be wrongfully killed than wrongfully incarcerated for life (or incarcerated for some length of time and then released). The argument is that it's still close enough that the argument of irreversibility should apply (IMHO) to life sentences. As such, I don't think this is a very strong argument against capital punishment. As an auxiliary point: I think there are other, much stronger arguments against CP. tl;dr: a life sentence is bad enough that the irreversibility argument should apply to it as well.

Nobody is going to argue that lives aren't being ruined, but you said the difference between being killed and being freed after a decade is marginal, which is almost too ridiculous to respond to.

It's one argument of many, but it's useful for people who think capital punishment is morally justified, but don't want innocent people killed.

So, do all of those people released from life imprisonment feel they'd be better off if they'd been killed?

I think the parent is right that society should not regard life sentences and capital punishment differently with regard to permanency. Yes on an individual level, there exists the possibility of reversing a life sentence any time prior to the inmates death, but I think it's wrong for society to regard a life sentence as somehow a "less serious" sentence than a death sentence. Yes there are some innocent people serving life sentences whose convictions are overturned before their death -- but there are also some innocent people sentenced to the death penalty who are freed prior to execution.

We cannot ignore that there are also innocent people who are sentenced to life in prison -- who die in prison. From the perspective of maximum damage, surely society has harmed these people (and their families) more than it harms the innocents who are executed.

> The argument is that it's still close enough that the argument of irreversibility should apply (IMHO) to life sentences.

That doesn't make sense. While irreversibility is, in fact, an absolute trait of a death sentence, the irreversibility argument is an argument about the relative features of death sentences vs. life imprisonment.

Its true that any imprisonment includes some harms that are (or some probability of harm that is) irreversible, those harms can stop being compounded at any time during the imprisonment by terminating the imprisonment -- as has been done, in fact, not only for innocence but for other causes -- and, even while irreversible, can in some cases be compensated for in some extent, which also (though more rarely) occurs.

To the extent either of those can happen in the case of death sentences, it is only because death sentences are, in practice, sentences to long-but-indefinite terms of imprisonment followed by death, and the imprisonment portion of that sentence behaves exactly like any other sentence of imprisonment. (And note that death sentence proponents often argue that this feature of the death sentence is, itself, a misfeature imposed by resistance to the death penalty which should ideally be eliminated.)

>I do see the difference, but I'm not convinced it's anything but marginal.

That is incredibly myopic and presumptuous. You're effectively arguing that we're going to destroy your life so it'll be better if we just end it. If the person's life ends up being so terrible after the fact they still have the option of just ending it. There is no benefit to making such a callous decision for them. Calling the argument weak when your own is short-sighted and at the very worst disingenuous is kind of disgusting to me, personally.

I am not even sure you understand your own position completely.

No. With respect you don't understand my position.

I argue that a life sentence is only marginally better than a death sentence. I further argue that if we oppose the death penalty on the grounds that it causes substantial irreversible damage, then we must also oppose perpetual incarceration because the difference in harm is not large enough (IMHO). I, and many others, are not willing to do away with perpetual incarceration so this is not a satisfactory line of argumentation.

From there, I reach my point: there are other, more compelling arguments against the death penalty.

I'll say the same thing to you as the other guy: you're making assumptions about my position relative to capital punishment.

If you're going to call people disgusting, at least make a good-faith effort to understand what they're saying.

You brought up those points, but there is no supporting evidence for them. There is plenty of accounts from people who went through this process with the exact opposite opinion you are stating.

No where in my post was there indication or any reason to make the claim that I don't understand what you're saying. I get what you're saying, it's just unsupported and presumptuous -- which is exactly what I said in my first post.

Even if we knew that in every single case that your life was completely ruined after the fact for various reasons (which is factually not the case), it's still morally reprehensible that you consider the outcomes marginally different to the point where whether or not we allowed you to live is insignificant.

I don't consider this argument weak at all. There is no reason for it to be weak; in fact the only way it can be weak is if you make certain assumptions (that we know aren't true) along with some other not-so-popular philosophical value judgements. Hence, not only is the position rather disgusting at a certain level, but making a claim that the argument in discussion is weak is actually rather weakly supported in and of itself.

Again, it is you who does not really understand the position you are taking. I'm not sure how much more you want me to spell it out.

> I argue that a life sentence is only marginally better than a death sentence. I further argue that if we oppose the death penalty on the grounds that it causes substantial irreversible damage, then we must also oppose perpetual incarceration because the difference in harm is not large enough (IMHO).

This is where your argument fails to convince me (and, I suspect, many others). I could accept, if I really stretched myself, that a death sentence is only marginally worse than a life sentence, but only up to the point when it is actually carried out. The obvious discontinuity brought about by the irreversibility of death cannot be ignored; it makes the distinction between the two sentences not marginal, but catastrophic.

Because of this, your argument is weak (IMHO, in keeping with your restrained manner).

Marginal doesn't matter. The function of justice in society is for people to feel protected, without the burden of constant attention to the safety and well-being of themselves and their family. That sense of justice is often wildly different than any objective measure of justice.

In the context of wrong convictions, I think the question is whether people fear being wrongly convicted more than they fear a cold-blooded killer escaping a life sentence. And secondarily, how strongly wrong convictions of others effects their sense of justice and equality more generally, and thus the legitimacy of their government.

I'm sure this sense has changed over the years, especially when we were more segregated and different classes of people didn't feel that the treatment of certain classes could effect their own class. But I think it's become increasingly the case that the death penalty is having a detrimental effect on our sense of justice and equality. Part of that has to do with modern mass media--dead or alive, our killers are both omni-present and strangely distant. Also, unlike in bygone times we basically kill on-the-spot many of the criminals we'd otherwise be afraid of. For example, domestic terrorists.

So on the whole I would guess that the death penalty provides increasingly less benefit and incurs increasing social costs. The moral question is more definitive for some, but if we're going to be utilitarian about it, it's much more complex than a simple accounting of the statistics.

A civilised country will pay restitution, a hefty amount for ten years false imprisonment.

with the underlying assumption that all damage is reversed.

No, that's not the assumption they're making. They're saying that the damage can at least be partially reversed.

So if there were convincing evidence, I would change my mind on whether or not anthropogenic climate change were happening or what our response to it should be. The right evidence would make me change my mind on whether motorcycle helmets are effective or whether separated bicycle lanes are good policy. Whether a welfare state furthers the public good.

There are reasonable arguments you can make about the death penalty, like uncertainty or cost or efficacy as a deterrent. They may even convince some people.

But a lot of people have an axiomatic view of the death penalty.

I personally hold the belief that killing is bad, and should be avoided, with some complicated feels towards self defense.

I may make all of the arguments above trying to convince people to oppose the death penalty. Hell, I may consider lying about the statistics. But they won't change my mind. If it's more expensive to not execute people or less effective at deterring crime, I'll still oppose the death penalty.

Uncertainty is no different. There is always uncertainty of varying degrees. There will be cases where the convicted is almost certainly guilty. Imagine a suspect commits his capital crime in full few of a large crowd of unbiased witnesses, many of who knew him personally and can clearly identify him. Moreover, he was taken into custody immediately after committing the crime, by police officers who also witnessed the crime. He gave an unforced confession, gave details not available to anyone else, and offers no remorse. He is mentally competent by any measure.

Add in any other caveats you'd like. If you are still opposed to the death penalty in this particular case, well, then you're not really concerned about the uncertainty, you're just opposed to the death penalty. If you aren't opposed to the death penalty in this case, then isn't it really just a matter of improving our definitions of "reasonable doubt" for capital cases?

I would argue that one extra point of interest would be the definition of the crimes that are considered worthy of capital punishment.

I think people could fall into a spectrum between the axiomatic views you present depending on what is considered a capital offense.

For example I might be in favor of capital punishment but only in cases of war crimes. In that case, for almost all intents and purposes I'm against death penalty since I only approve of it in extreme cases, versus someone that is in favor of death penalty for rapists (assuming there is no uncertainty like in your example), since I could indeed imagine a rape victim that would like to have the rapist dead.

So I agree that if you have an axiomatic view as you put it, the rest of the (non-axiomatic) factors will not be of relevance to you, but then the problem becomes defining on which side of the slide do you consider your view to be axiomatic.

My point is that this almost seems as a sort of "fractal" discussion in the sense that you can always think of yet another factor that would establish different positions for two people although they might seemingly have the "same" axiomatic view, and that makes it very hard to discuss this subject without polarizing people.

If you think that killing is always wrong then you'll eventually be guilty of killing by omission

As it was shown even this weekend in St. Cloud

Society has a lot of self-contradictory situations like that. Hence why I think no value is absolute

There's a big difference between killing defensively and killing in the name of justice, though. There's no conflict in believing that (1) life is always hallowed, (2) retributive killing is always wrong, and (3) killing is justified in some situations to preserve life.

Sure there is. What is your definition of "hallowed"? By implication, I believe the author used it to mean "killing is always wrong", or "life must always be preserved."

Is that is indeed the definition, #1 and #3 are directly incompatible. This is the problem with using words like "hallowed" in philosophical debates. One person uses a word without defining it, and they intend it one way. Then the other party argues with their imperfect and improvised understanding of the word's definition, and no one gets anywhere. This is how we end up with six people debating whether or not "the good always matches the beautiful", and it's one of the reasons philosophy as a discipline has a bad reputation to outsiders.

If you dig deep enough, what will often happen is one or more parties will try to create an empirical definition and the other parties will just use circular definitions until it's clear they're not saying anything at all.

If "hallowed" doesn't mean "must always be preserved", I'm not sure it can mean anything of consequence to the debate. You could define it as "must be preserved unless there is a justifiable reason not to", but then you're not saying anything new. It's redundant.

There is no incompatibility at all. If life is hallowed, it follows that the only situation in which killing would be justified would be to prevent another killing.

If anything, war makes a much more challenging case for this view, unless you accept a position of total pacifism

Please define "hallowed" for me. As I explained, I believe the only definition of "hallowed" with any consequence to the debate is "must always be preserved."

If that is the definition we're working with, it precludes "justifiable" exceptions, because there are no exceptions allowed. You'd need to equate passively allowing someone to kill another life with actively killing to preserve a life, which is another entire debate before we can begin to take that as a premise.

If that is not the definition, then why should we bother saying something like "life is hallowed"? What could it mean that would have any consequence for, or add any further meaning to the debate? "Life is meaningful."? "Life is to be respected."?

This is the complexity inherent to engaging in dialectics, and in my opinion words like "hallowed" should simply be avoided unless they're rigorously defined by all parties.

"Should never be taken except to preserve another life" seems both consequential and fitting.

Fair enough, I suppose that does fit.

Capital punishment isn't only retributive in character, it is also deterrence.

If you are then going to argue that it doesn't actually deter then why not do away with all punishments for crimes?

> Capital punishment isn't only retributive in character, it is also deterrence.

Every study of it -- as practiced in the modern US, at least -- I've seen has shown that it has no or negligible additional deterrent effect, so I'd say that in fact it is not deterrence. Of the five classes of justification for criminal punishment, the modern death penality is obviously not reformative or expiatory (but then, punishment itself usually isn't expiatory, limitations and exceptions to punishment usually are), and empirically not deterrent. If you are going to make a case for it, you probably need to appeal to either retributive or preventive/incapacitory theories of justice.

You did not answer my question. Is punishment deterring people from committing crimes? Yes or no? If you say no then we need no punishment and we can make every crime legal.

There are several possibilities as to why capital punishment may not be or may not seem to be as effective today as it could be.

The first obvious one is that universities and most of media has been under control by the left for decades now, so everyone that might tell you death penalty is ineffective is more likely to follow an ideology that views these punishments as inhumane or have an incentive to do so. (Let's not kid ourselves, most people here that are against capital punishment do this because they view it as inhumane. If presented with two studies where one showed that is was ineffective and one that is was effective most of these people would choose to believe the first one - no matter what)

The other possibility is that we made changes to how we apply the death penalty that causes it to be less of a deterrence. For example it gets less and less likely for any criminal to be actually executed, and if that happens then often after decades of trials and retrials. Or how about the fact that we seem to be so much more concerned today about the cruelty and the supposed inhumane treatment of the criminal than about what the victims of said criminal had to go through?

There used to be a time when we hanged people publicly for everyone (including the criminals family) to see. Today we make criminals that are executed into martyrs against state cruelty (many even reach celebrity status) instead of displaying them as criminals that are likely to piss their pants in public before being hanged for their heinous crimes. This definitely has an effect on deterrence.

I would hold the maxim that killing is wrong when it is not absolutely necessary. A stone-age tribe does not necessarily have the calories just to keep someone imprisoned. A modern society most certainly does. There is no "need" for the government to force people sully their consciences by partaking in an institutional murder.

I believe that killing is always wrong, education is always possible, and redemption is always possible.

I place human life above logical consistency in my arguments.

> guilty of killing by omission

You're really going to have to justify and unpack this one. Especially as I'm not sure what details you're referring to.

A radical Islamist yesterday attacked and wounded 8 or 9 people with a knife in a mall before he was shot dead by an off duty cop.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/us/police-shoot-attacker-i...

There is not much in France that I cherish more than the ideal and fight behind abolition of death penalty (useless trivia: it happened to be voted the year of my birth). Countless philosophers and thinkers through the course of the 20th century have written about it, culminating in the speech of Robert Badinter who fiercely defended this bill to be passed. Sadly, I have a hard time finding any of this material translated into English.

Here are a few, though, for the curious:

Those who believe in the dissuasive value of death penalty are unaware of the human truth. The criminal passion is not the more stopped by the fear of death than other passions which are themselves noble.

— Robert Badinter, extrait d'un discours à l’Assemblée nationale - 17 Septembre 1981

So what is capital punishment but the most deliberate of murders, to which no infamy, however calculated, could be compared to?

— Albert Camus

Death penalty is an immoral punishment, or at the very least useless, because it make us used to the performance of torments, and because it repairs nothing; as, sadly, the death of the murderer does not give back life to the victim.

— François Eugène Vidocq.

What does Law says? Thou shalt not kill! How does she says it? By Killing!

— Victor Hugo, Les misérables

I looked into death penalty by both of its sides, direct action, indirect action. What remains of it? Only a horrible and useless thing, only a bloody assault called crime when the individual carries it, and called justice (oh pain!) when society perpetrates it. Know this, whoever you are, lawmakers or judges, to the eyes of God, to the eyes of conscience, what is crime for the individual is crime for society.

— Victor Hugo, discours devant l’Assemblée constituante, 1848

As long as death penalty exists, we will feel cold when stepping into a Court of Appeal, enshrouded in night.

— Victor Hugo

Death penalty is opposite to what mankind, since two thousand years, has thought of higher and dreams of more noble.

— Jean Jaurès

To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.

— Desmond Tutu

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination because there it is invested with the approval of the society. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

— George Bernard Shaw

All these quotes basically amount to "I'm against killing people" usually with a reason amounting to one of the following:

- Killing is bad

- Killing constitutes revenge

- Killing is unbecoming of society

- Killing is disturbing

Yes, they're from great thinkers, but on their own they don't constitute much of an argument, nor are they particularly elucidating.

The devils advocate might respond:

- pleasant dissuasion is oxymoronic

- what is justice without revenge?

- there's value in symbolism (a hornets nest of an argument, I willingly admit, but one that I think is nonetheless undervalued)

- the disturbing nature of killing has little to do with anything

- we recognize that lethal force is legitimate in self-defense, so clearly some intentional killing is acceptable. This is at odds with the sweeping condemnation of killing in the selected quotes.

- the comparison of capital punishment to murder is fallacious since the former is done with careful attention to impartiality (in principle, anyway)

- the state is founded on the monopoly of violence

I'm as French as you are, cher ami, but there are few things I cherish less about our country than our penchant for empty grandiloquence (exhibit A: Bernard Henri Levi). Appeal to authority does not a strong argument make; just because Victor Hugo said it doesn't make it true. It also pays to remember that many of the individuals you cite are reacting to a very different brand of capital punishment: the kind in which people were tortured in the public square.

To be clear, these intellecutals do have interesting things to say on the subject, but a handful of quotes does little to advance the debate. What we have here are just pretty words, I'm afraid.

> To be clear, these intellecutals do have interesting things to say on the subject, but a handful of quotes does little to advance the debate

Obviously, but I could not translate a whole body of work on the spot, therefore I had to take shortcuts so as to give a few pointers for the interested audience. The whole process was a saga in and of itself, and Badinder's eloquent discourse on 17 sept 1981 goes more in depth, interestingly counterpointed by Maurice Barrès's one in 1908 in a paperback[0]. Again, the tip of the iceberg, but hey, we got to start somewhere before digging deeper.

[0] ISBN 978-2757815021, seems available on amazon.com for a couple of bucks, apparently also in English

Bernard Henri Levi is a simpler case as you just have to think and do the opposite of what he professes.

To be honest I included it just as a clin d'oeil

But he is emblematic of the cultural trait in question, I think.

> what is justice without revenge?

Justice. Sentencing is here to take criminals away from the rest of society, in order to protect the latter rather than punish the former.

I'm glad you were able to close the case on one of the oldest philosophical problems in existence. I'm glad it was that simple.

I was hoping a Frenchman would recognize that I was merely paraphrasing one of Hugo's main arguments against capital punishment, developed in his preface of Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné, rather than "close the case on one of the oldest philosophical problems in existence".

And? Presumably you're paraphrasing him to imply that his argument is correct.

You can add Pope Francis to that list too,

"For the rule of law, the death penalty represents a failure, as it obliges the state to kill in the name of justice. … Justice can never be wrought by killing a human being. … With the application of the death penalty, the convict is denied the possibility of to repent or make amends for the harm caused; the possibility of confession, by which a man expresses his inner conversion, and contrition, the gateway to atonement and expiation, to reach an encounter with God's merciful and healing justice. It is furthermore frequently used by totalitarian regimes and groups of fanatics for the extermination of political dissidents, minorities, and any subject labeled as 'dangerous' or who may be perceived as a threat to its power or to the achievement of its ends."

https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/pope-francis-death...

I think people should be given life with no danger of parole, but offered the option of euthenasia.

    > the article only devotes a single sentence to the
    > core of the argument, at the very beginning: the
    > author has come to believe that life is either
    > hallowed or not, and he prefers to believe that it is
    > always hallow, and killing always wrong

I'm not sure that's the core of the argument, simply as I don't believe life is hallowed, nor I do support the death penalty, and I don't think there's any dissonance in this position.

I can't explain to you any sort of moral basis for feeling life isn't hallowed, and isn't indeed particularly special, but I know I've felt this way for most of my life. Death often causes loss and suffering in those around the dying, and often in those who know they're about to die, but the dead are incapable of caring that they're dead, and everyone's going to die.

However: the death penalty seems simply ineffective in any of the goals it sets out to achieve, and so I don't support it.

But not everyone believes one of those two axioms. If you do not believe that killing is always wrong, and you do not believe that justice requires execution, you must inform your choice some other way.

I'm a military physician, and I was a line officer before that. I have watched people die and brought one back to life. I have trained to kill and save. I have brought a ship alongside suspect vessels for boarding and sent men into flooded engineering spaces. In my mind, the most important of those is that I have sent my people into harm's way. I would argue, from a leadership perspective, the hallowed-vs-not argument is a red herring. The money is trivia. The indirect utility of deterrence is not measurable and therefore frankly doesn't matter.

But the toll on your own people has real consequences that you can prevent. Killing someone is the sort of thing that makes you question your own right to life. Don't do that to people unless you have to, and by "have to", I mean there is an imminent threat to life. You don't "have to" pay taxes. Someone's going to come after you, but they're not going to kill you over it. You don't have to kill prisoners.

>You don't "have to" pay taxes. Someone's going to come after you, but they're not going to kill you over it.

While they may not kill you directly for paying taxes, if they come for you, or your property, and you attempt to defend yourself they will kill you

Thus I believe that is in fact being killing because you did not pay taxes and that also means you in fact you "have to" pay taxes

You should really define "defend yourself".

Sure, if an IRS agent comes with a policeman, and you pickup a gun and start waving it, you may get shot. But if you just don't give money to the IRS, nobody is going to actively try to kill you. Your life gets much, much worse, but you aren't killed.

Well, you're figuratively killed in prison.

You're not figuratively killed in prison. You're held for punishment.

And what happens when you get out? For some, they can never get back into normal life and end up in a cyclic life of crime/prison

> Your life gets much, much worse, but you aren't killed.

As I said, you are not figuratively killed in prison.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but if you're life on the streets is over due to a cyclic prison/crime cycle, how is your day to day life not over?

Well first, you're assuming that everyone that goes to prison gets stuck in that cycle. Prison does you no favors, but I've seen first hand that the cycle does not always happen.

Secondly, prison does not end your day to day life. There are many people serving time who will get out and be able to go on with their life. Not everyone who goes to prison gets a life sentence. And even for those who are doing long stints, they very well do have a life worth living. Prison sucks, but saying someone who's doing a stint (or multiple) doesn't have a life worth living is a akin to telling them to commit suicide.

I understand you were probably engaging in hyperbole, but it's clear (to me at least) that you probably have not encountered many (or any) people who have gone to prison. Your view of prison inmates is probably a combination of a few tv shows. As someone who has a better view I'll say that prisoners do have lives worth living, they do have rights, and (when prison is done correctly) they should come out better on the other side.

Prison is shitty, and leaves a stigma on people that is hard to shake. But prisoner is in that situation, not of that situation.

IRS agents, or more likely local tax agents will attempt to take your stuff, i.e your home, land, etc to cover your "debt" to them

if you attempt to defend your property from their theft then you will be shot.

So yes they will actively kill you.

That argument doesn't follow at all.

If you owe taxes, the government's actions to reclaim those don't constitute theft.

If anyone is stealing, in this hypothetical where you aren't paying your taxes, it's you, from the rest of us.

Why do you believe you have a ethical claim on my labor? Do you own me?

While there can be a case for Land taxation, there is no ethical claim for Income Taxation.

Then why is land taxation ok, but not income?

With any good or service, there is the same economic trace back to government subsidies. Your income comes from the trading of goods or services.

If you fail to pay your taxes to the government, and the government takes your land – you have to ask, where did you get your land from?

I own a house, if you trace back the chain of land ownership, the original title was issued by the government. (Where did the government get that land from? They stole it from the indigenous people.) When the government gave the first titleholder the land, they granted that title subject to the understanding that taxes would be paid and laws would be obeyed (including taxes and laws introduced after the original title was issued.) You can't give better title than what you have, so every subsequent owner, up to myself, has inherited the same obligation to pay taxes and obey laws. If the government's right to tax me is invalid, then my ownership of the land my house is built on is invalid too.

This would be valid if we were only talking about taxation applied to the actual land.

The scenario I described was the IRS taking your land to cover taxation based on your Income, IRS does not tax land in any way. They tax income and other transactions but not land.

The IRS however can take your home, car, or any other personal property you own to cover income based taxation.

I actually agree with your assessment for pure land taxation (not to include any structures, or other items you places upon the land)

Taxing land value I believe has a ethical foundation for the reasons you stated, taxing income has no ethical foundation for those same reasons. If you believe the government has the right to tax land because it has or once had an ownership interest over that land, then the only possible reason you could agree that the government has the right to tax income is if you believe the government has a ownership interest over your person.

When the government gave or sold the land to the first titleholder, it was not giving or selling absolute rights over the land – that is sovereignity, which governments usually don't sell or give up (although occasionally they do, e.g. Russia selling Alaska to the US) – it was giving or selling only partial rights. Even if it labelled the transaction "freehold", I think in reality all real estate is actually leasehold, with the government as the landlord, subject to lease conditions (laws) and rent due (taxation). It retained the ultimate ownership of the land, and only sold/gave a limited and subordinated form of ownership.

Suppose someone wants to lease land, and make the rent proportional to the tenant's income. You might think it is an odd arrangement, but freedom of contract implies if landlord and tenant agree on this it is binding. Now, that essentially describes income tax. The government owns all its territory, it has leased it to the residents of that territory, it has made the rent (tax) proportional to income. If you don't pay your rent, the government can seize your moveable property, just like how your landlord can seize your moveable property if you don't pay your rent. (Unpaid rent is a debt, and its collection can be compelled through the same legal processes as any other debt.)

"But the toll on your own people has real consequences that you can prevent. Killing someone is the sort of thing that makes you question your own right to life."

Agreed. We never consider the toll this takes on the executioner. How about the cost to society? The people that have to witness death will have long term psychological issues. How about the cost to society when we realize we've executed the wrong person? The downsides to our barbaric practice of executions are huge, and quantifiable.

What's not quantifiable is the motivation for keeping the death penalty. The only justification after debunking all other reasons is belief. People "believe" that killing is the only punishment that fits the crime. We should not be in the practice of making life or death decisions based on belief.

>Killing someone is the sort of thing that makes you question your own right to life.

This is part of what I would mean by saying life is hallowed. I don't think it a red herring. Killing does damage to the killers as well as those killed. To choose it under less than terrible necessity is a mistake.

I hear what you're saying, but in English-speaking Christianity, the word "hallowed" is strongly associated with religious obligation. And invoking God just takes the conversation down a highly polarized path.

You must use a different dictionary. Merriam-Webster lists:

    1: holy, consecrated <the church stands on hallowed ground>

    2: sacred, revered <the university's hallowed halls> <hallowed customs>

The second is a perfectly reasonable usage.

> If justice requires a life for a life, you don't scrimp on that, either. You pay whatever monetary, emotional, and moral costs are necessary for justice to be done.

How exactly do you reach this conclusion, I mean what underlying principle is this based on?

I ask this because the question that immediately comes to my mind is that if this principle were true (which I dispute) then it wouldn't matter at all whether the monetary cost was $100 or $100 trillion dollars per execution.

This is obviously not true, therefore the cost a society is willing to pay must be based on something else.

In my opinion it is based on a combination of factors like how much available resources does a society have, how great is the need to deter others from committing the same crime (some countries have such high crime rates that they are actually destabilised by it) and what exactly is the value of a human life to a society.

> If killing is always wrong

That is only a question for persons that live in societies where violent crime doesn't exist (utopia) or for those who wouldn't use lethal force to protect their own lives in face of a life threatening attack.

For all others this cannot be a question. Killing is justified in many cases and being able to defend one self is a useful skill everyone should aspire have.

I searched the article after reading it and then reading your post. I don't see anything about financial cost in the article except the line "despite the cost" which is not necessarily talking about financial.

This is the core of the problem.

The core argument I see being made -- not even mentioned in your list -- is the effective impossibility that the death penalty can ever be fairly enforced in our justice system (given that it doesn't just err occasionally; it errs frequently and systematically). Combined, of course, with the uniquely irreversible nature of the death penalty itself.

All the other arguments don't matter.

Others disagree.

If justice requires a life for a life,

An assumption which not only everyone shares, but which is on its face quite problematic.

This is a strange article. The author glosses over the criminals charged with death penalty easily and goes into depth about his and his staff's personal experience and their moral burden/PTSD, the distress they might have felt. While that's a valid point of view, it completely sidesteps the core issue of why the author is advocating a change in his stance on the death penalty, or worse, it's the only reason for the change.

Being an outsider, it's something I notice a lot in American media - a tendency by law officials (and soldiers) to lament about their suffering while not paying enough attention to the people who are the real figures of the tragedies (death penalty, victims of war). It also relates to the hero worship that I see in American culture (even online). Every soldier with a PTSD is made out to be a "poor fellow who needs help". The person who said "yes" to being comfortable in killing people telling his harrowing story about how difficult it was for his staff.

Apologies in advance if the above comes across as too insensitive. Not sure what I'm trying to say here but just dumping my immediate thoughts.

> The author glosses over the criminals charged with death penalty easily and goes into depth about his and his staff's personal experience and their moral burden/PTSD, the distress they might have felt.

I think that is pretty much expected with an article titled "What I Learned from Executing Two Men".

> Being an outsider, it's something I notice a lot in American media - a tendency by law officials (and soldiers) to lament about their suffering while not paying enough attention to the people who are the real figures of the tragedies (death penalty, victims of war).

But there is damage on both sides. No one disputes the suffering of those who are killed, but it's a fairly recent development to study the suffering of those on the other end. I think it should be studied so that we know what we're asking people to do (be it an executioner, soldier or first responder).

I don't think that the article is trying to give a definitive answer, just his perspective on it.

How can a society which calls itself "civilized" keep the death penalty?

There's so much deeply disturbingly wrong with it that I don't even.

We kill less than 100 people per year via execution.

Not so bad compared to drone strikes: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/dron...

The really horrifying thing to me is that drone strikes aren't even a serious topic this election cycle. HRC is in favor for more. Trump wants to commit war crimes. Perhaps I am biased because I helped to do a lot of them.

In the end it comes down to the same thing, judging the value of other people's lives, or perhaps more callously never thinking about their lives at all.

Although I agree killing people is wrong, drones strikes are not killing american citizens, it is in the context of an armed, foreign conflict.

American lives are worth more then? Who are we fighting exactly?

To the American government, yes of course they are.

The American government isn't supposed to be some even-handed dispenser of global justice; its job is to protect American citizens and their interests.

I have trouble squaring this with the DNC narrative that we are stronger together and that immigration is good. How can they claim to be the party of humanism and also advocate for more drone strikes and overseas conflict?

> its job is to protect American citizens and their interests

Are you implying that you can dispense with human rights when it comes to foreign civilians? I am also very frightened by the fact that you are, apparently, condoning it to "protect [American citizens] interests". I hope that interests means safety here.

By your earlier comment, it sounds like you know more about this situation than the avg HN user. Please dispense with the Socratic method, it's not great for async forums.

Can you answer these questions for us? Do we strike targets without high enough precision, or wrongfully? Who exactly are we fighting? Can you link us to some sources we might not have already seen?

Yes, there have been lives snuffed out with drones, and yes, there might have been collateral damage. I think it's safe to assume in most cases it's a "them or us" situation.

"War is hell." - Sherman, and yes it's an ironic quote because like the earlier context it contains, I've never experienced war.

I think what annoys me the most about the phrase ‘collateral damage’ is it sounds like someone bumped into another car more than it sounds like an innocent person was murdered.

We should replace it with 'collateral murder', maybe.

Sure, if you just want to confuse the discussion. Murder is a criminal concept. This is an armed conflict and it has its own set of rules and ethical/moral frameworks.

That doesn't mean that 'anything goes' or that there aren't arguments to be made to minimize civilian casualties or just plain strategic arguments against the practices, it just means that it isn't helpful to try to frame the discussion as if we are talking criminal actions.

Fair enough, it’s an armed conflict. That means the Geneva Conventions come into play and “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds” are prohibited to civilians and enemy combatants who have laid down their arms. Guess we’d better get The Hague involved for the drone pilots then?

As you say, such a term would confuse the discussion. But I feel the current term, collateral damage, does the same thing. When someone says collateral damage the image that comes to my mind is property damage, not personal injury and specially not death of uninvolved bystanders. Death is more than damage. Obviously, murder is something else altogether.

That was my point, even if I didn't make very well.

The problem that arises from "collateral damage" of drone strikes is that it makes it easier for the real bad guys to recruit more bad buys.

That has been shown to be true, whether in Yemen, Iraq or Afghanistan.

Without a formal declaration of war, drone strikes are pretty much just summary executions of human beings without recourse to a fair trial.

...and I take it by your comment that it is perfectly fine if another country sends drones into the US to take out 'suspected operatives'?

It's going to be very tough for you or anybody else to convince most Americans that drone strikes are a bad idea. They've been so brainwashed by the govt that they know no better.

Talking about a 'fair trial' only makes sense when dealing with issues in the realm of criminal law.

But drone strikes and other military actions are distinctly outside the realm of criminal law. It is a category error to try to apply the concepts of a 'fair trial' to these situations.

There are entirely different set of rules and agreements that are associated with armed conflict. Even the moral/ethical arguments are entirely different within the context of armed conflict vs criminal law.

One of the reasons our public discussion on these issues is so muddled is that these two contexts are often confused.

As an example, many critics of the US policy regarding detainees at Guantanamo Bay will argue that we have failed to give them a 'fair trial'. But that is attempting to insert criminal law concepts into an armed conflict. It isn't necessary to prove that a crime has been committed in order to detain people in an armed conflict. Different rules apply.

I'm not suggesting that there aren't arguments to be made against the detainee program, but those arguments need to be made in the scope of the legal framework accorded armed conflict not in the scope of the legal framework for criminal activities.

I mentioned 'fair trial' in the context of 'justice'.

I cannot point to a stranger in the street and say "That man is a murderer" and have an official immediately go over and dispatch him with extreme prejudice.

If we say that 'point and kill' executions are OK outside the realm of formal war, then pretty much _everyone_ in the world is living with a sword of Damocles over their heads.

A declaration of war is usually done by countries, not by small groups of people or terrorist organizations.

What "suspected operatives" in the US would you be talking about?

I'd define 'suspected operatives' as people who are either financing, supporting, training or ordering others to commit murder on strangers on the other side of the world.

You know, the EXACT same definition that is used to select targets for US drone strikes.

Are you implying that foreign civilian lives are not worth of the same consideration given to american citizens? Because drone strikes often have civilian casualties, and civilians in the interested zones live in fear of being killed by american strikes, to the point that they see the strikes a more likely cause of death that the nearby armed conflict.

At least two according to Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrajudicial_killing#United_S...

I'm pretty peaceful, but surgical, targeted drone strikes against combatants that are currently a threat against civilians isn't exactly going to keep me up at night.

Edit:

Yikes, the downvote brigade is swift. Here is what I'm saying: Compared to traditional war. Where we lose tens of thousands of people or more on both sides, targeted drone strikes are a net positive. I'm not for perpetual war in the middle east, but realistically speaking we can't just pull out everywhere and targeted drone strikes are better than conventional responses.

What civilians are they a threat against exactly?

At least 160 children through 2011. It's been a lot more time since then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_US_dr...

Does that mean you are 100% confident that these drone strikes are ONLY killing bad guys that deserve it? How many collateral deaths of innocent men, women and children do you consider OK before it begins to infringe on your peaceful sleep?

The Taliban keep women and children at their militant camps. We cannot stop fighting a war, cannot cripple our effectiveness, simply because the enemy has decided to put the innocent in harms way. The US military goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but at some point you must do what must be done.

Ever wondered why they exist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

This is not the point. The point is not why they exist, or why we are at war. The point is that drones are better that stealth bombers. They are more targeted. Less civilians die.

I agree, we should fix our diplomacy and hopefully we'll live in a world without drones one day. But in the mean time, fixing our prisons is more important.

> They are more targeted. Less civilians die.

Even "more targeted" would be sending in operatives to only kill those directly identified as combatants; no collateral damage at all to civilians, double-tap to the head and job done. Mossad used .22 pistols from point-blank distance for this purpose as their bullets posed no danger of exiting the skull and injuring bystanders.

But the USA doesn't do that, at least not for run-of-the-mill bad-guys, apparently because they consider the life of a soldier-citizen more valuable that a non-citizen.

That's what causes such distaste. One guy controlling a drone from Nevada is considered more important than some human-shield hostages in Pakistan.

Our people are and should be our priority. The duty of America is first and foremost to the American people. There is no duty to unnecessarily endanger your own people to avoid collateral damage, particularly when the enemy has chosen to bring non-combatants into their camps.

We don't live in a Utopia. I don't need to be 100% confident that drone strikes are ONLY killing 100% bad guys. Tens of millions of people died in WW2. The answer to stoping drone strikes is increasing diplomacy in the Middle East - not burying our head in the sand and banning drones from doing drone strikes against enemy combatants.

This is an easy thing to say when it isn't your country being bombed by foreign powers.

What about the rest of the drone strikes?

Yeah, and screw due process, rules of war, international treaties or even collateral victims.

Unfortunately, the opposition said that long before we did. Not saying I'm happy with our decisions regarding how to wage a war like this, but I can at least understand how we got to this place.

>Unfortunately, the opposition said that long before we did.

That no more an excuse than "we were following orders" has been.

Nonsense. My statement relates to the realities of fighting a "war" against an ideology rather than a nation state, to which all those niceties (Geneva convention) were designed to accommodate. The system we have for fighting traditional wars does not apply to the shit we're dealing with. Bombs in Chelsea? Asshat stabbing spree in Minnesota? Geneva convention _that_.

And my statement relates to the reality that the war is one-sided (a huge country or countries vs some fanatic goat herders with guns), and less about results and more about ensuring a continuous presence and state of affairs. Besides, it has killed much more innocent in foreign places that people or even soldiers have been killed on the "under defence" side. It's mostly oil, strategic interests, business as usual -- that were handed over a nice pretext that Bush took away and run with it.

If you had included Obama's continuation plus expansion of Bush era foreign policies, I might have taken your statement seriously.

Even in the case that the target of drone strikes were threats, often times these attacks lead to a number of civilian casualties that, I think, could be in no way justified.

As compared to the Blitz on Coventry or the Fire storms at Dresden?

Or for example my fathers house being bombed in ww2 - they lived close to the biggest spitfire plant in the UK.

I don't think I have the expertise to make the comparison to the historical events you cited, but I believe that, regardless of whether we consider those justified or not (I admit that I tend to say no, but would gladly listen to arguments made by expert supporting the opposite view, and in fact I am eager to). Another case we can talk about was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here the number of civilians killed is so outrageous that I don't know if there is any sensible way of condoning it.

An attempt to give an analysis would be asking: what was the good reason to do it? I think that the answer to that question in the case of the drone strikes is not satisfactory.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/us-dro...

http://www.newsweek.com/wedding-became-funeral-us-still-sile...

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama-terro...

Wonder how well one would sleep having drones flying above ones head, with say 99% accuracy in targeting and evidence based missions (both which I suspect has much higher failure rates than 1%).

That is to say, how peaceful is it to put Damocles swords over people? Maybe it is similar mine laying which was also promoted as a form of peacekeeping, done by neutral countries during world war 2. Surgical, targeted activity, against combatants that are currently a threat against civilians. Just don't mind how it effected fishermen when 1% of those mines got loose and started to drift.

The problem is that these strikes aren't targeted very well

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-am-on-the-us-kill-list...

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone...

> Perhaps I am biased because I helped to do a lot of them.

If that means what I think it means I'm sure you have some more valuable insights to share on the topic, biased or not.

I helped too by paying my taxes. I'm responsible for the death and destruction caused by my country and it makes me sick to my stomach.

>We kill less than 100 people per year via execution.

And that's OK because?

Not to mention the absolute horror that is Death Row, even without execution.

Not to mention that having 5 times more prisoners per capita than any other country (or 99% of other countries) is already a bad thing. Or the horrific prison conditions for a developed western country, including private prisons and forced labour.

Or the absolutely astounding (compared to any developed Western country) numbers of police shootings...

I'm not saying it is. Just putting it into context. If we want to save the most lives, perhaps we should focus on the political choices which are killing the most.

This is not only about saving lives, it's the ethical point of it. Drone strikes are horrible, death penalty is horrible, both can be talked about.

I can't understand why American society has this need for narrow-focus in ONE specific issue at a time, is there a reason for this cultural approach?

So it can ignore everything else while business goes on as usual...

The corporate controlled media likes divide and conqueror as a propaganda technique, you'll see people copying it a lot.

Why do international megacorporations like it so much? Probably some tangential hangover of union busting.

It is the erroneous belief that every topic, including those concerning human life, can be a relativism.

"why American society has this need for narrow-focus in ONE specific issue at a time"

This isn't an American phenomena, it's a human one. EVERYONE can only focus on one issue at a time. It's a delusion that we tell ourselves that we can focus on more than one thing at a time:

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2012/04/24/yanss-podcast-episod...

(That doesn't mean we can't talk about one and then talk about another, which is probably what you meant. But you still have to do one at a time, or make a comparison, you can't just consider all issues simultaneously)

How would you compare sitting in death row for any amount of time, with a drone strike, which is instant?

Not necessarily instant.

Presumably if you are sitting in death row, you have already been through a trial before judge and jury and had a lawyer appointed to represent you and ensure you had a (reasonably) fair trial and got to state your facts.

Drone strikes just come out of nowhere and with no warning when you are having a nap or sitting down to a cup of tea or attending your cousins wedding because someone with a dossier on the other side of the world decided you had to be killed without any of the above recourses to argue your case.

Going through the trial itself could be a traumatic experience. You have to face a prosecutor who wants to kill you and a jury that you must beg for your life to.

Then you also have the process of appeals which slowly torture you with uncertainty until you are finally executed.

In the end, somebody die of course.

Yes, but plenty of people on death row have been given a reprieve, or had their sentences changed to life imprisonment, or obtained full pardons if found innocent.

Pretty sure no one has fully recovered from a Hellfire missile through their kitchen or car window when someone checks the dossier later and goes "Oops, that was the target's brother, who happened to have his wife and kids with him at the time..."

It's certainly a different kind of harm, maybe even apple and orange to compare.

At the end of both someone dies. Look killing isn't easy. Both of these things are choices our country is making.

You are implying that one way of dying is better than the other but what do you know about the stress of living in Syria or Afghanistan? Have you ever taken a life?

I'm confused that you point out another person's rhetoric is implying one way of dying is worse than the other, but your original post on the matter also contains rhetoric in which method which the government kills people is more significant than another method which the government kills people.

If you're using that kind of rhetoric itself, why are you pointing it out as if it's a flaw in someone else's reasoning?

(My opinion on the subject is that neither the death penalty nor drone strikes should continue.)

Statistically speaking drone strikes are more significant because we kill more people each year (and more innocent bystanders) with drones than via trial and jury executions.

I think it is much harder for the person I was responding to to prove that somehow being on Death Row is more stressful than living in a war zone.

I don't believe there is a way to prove that either way. Experiences are subjective.

You are believing the propaganda that drone strikes are clean and surgical. In reality there will be people who survive with serious burns, limbs cut off and other horrific injuries.

When your neighbour's house is blown up with no warning, you're now on death row. Death row has an actual reprieve. Drone strikes have a low probability of killing any particular person, but the fear of falling bombs sticks with you.

This was the experience of people threatened by the Nazi V-weapons ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-weapons ), and it is still the fear of people threatened with aerial bombardment.

Stopping killing by execution is 100% solvable, and most other countries have done so. [1]

Stopping going to war is much harder and there are only a few countries that have done so. [2]

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country
  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_country

IMO capital punishment is much more honest than life-without-parole.

If you're going to throw someone in prison for the rest of their life, be honest about it and admit you are taking their life.

Abolishing capital punishment to "fix" criminal justice is just closing your eyes and pretending to not see the issue.

If someone is wrongly imprisoned for life, they have a chance of getting out. If someone is wrongly executed, there is no way to fix that.

While that's true, the vast majority of people who are released on new evidence BECAUSE of the many appeals you get before execution.

If those people hadn't been on death row, they'd still be rotting in prison.

If you give people the option of throwing someone in prison and forgetting about them, or forcing them to actually decide on their guilt, they will always choose the former.

If I was wrongly convicted, I would much, much, much rather be on death row than in for life-without-parole.

That's a critique of the current state of our legal system, not whether the death penalty is just in the case of a wrongly convicted innocent person.

Let me know when you've created an ideal criminal legal justice system.

Fix the problems with wrongful conviction, lack of appeals, etc etc, and we can come back and abolish capital punishment.

But right now, it's naiive to advocate for abolishing capital punishment, because in the absence of other reforms, it simply makes the current system worse.

I'm confused. How does abolishing capital punishment make a system that we know has executed innocent people worse?

Halt capital punishment to prevent further, irreversible, errors. AND work on other reforms (better trial lawyers, more equitable appeals process, etc.). Then you can bring back capital punishment once we have a greater degree of confidence in the system.

I don't claim to be able to make an ideal criminal legal justice system. But I do think we can make improvements, this being one of them.

Why do you think the rest of the first world has outlawed capital punishment?

not if you would be in any 3rd world country, or Singapore for that matter

New evidence cannot set free a prisoner the state killed last year.

Correct, it's called wrongful execution, and is a very real problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution

Non-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution

Abolishing capital punishment isn't intended to fix the issue you're describing. You may not have done so intentionally but you've created a Straw Man there.

Abolishing capital punishment allows us to reverse the decision later when new evidence comes to light exonerating the convict. You can't free a dead person.

There are other justifications as well in terms of financial cost although the facts are more cloudy there, I've seen good quality analyses presenting cases in favour of both arguments around the cost of the death penalty vs lifetime incarceration.

Multiple countries have abolished the life-without-parole as well - my country did so in 1884, after having abolished the death penalty in 1867.

Life without parole was found to breach human rights in the EU and other places:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment#Reform_or_ab...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/world/europe/10iht-britain...

which sometimes brings ridiculous situations, when people like Breivik are sentenced to 21 years, because that's the Norway limit.

that's showing a weakness to evil, and weakness will always be eventually used against the best intentions of original authors (in his case, I wouldn't mind firing squad right after trial, in same way he killed those kids). there is 0% doubt about his full guilt, and almost 100% chance he will never add any positive value to mankind, ever.

Norway's treatment of Breivik has nothing to do with Breivik and everything to do with the sort of society Norwegians want to live in. They simply aren't prepared to abandon their values and respect for human life because of the evil acts of a maniac. I applaud them for it.

He got 21 year special detention (forvaring), meaning he'll probably sit for life or until he is no longer deemed a threat to society. The detention will be renewed every 5 year or so by a special court.

But this is also problematic as the prisoner is locked up for an undetermined amount of time, which is suffering in and of itself. But I don't think it's worse than life without parole, which seems like absolute torture to me.

BTW, after 2015 the maximum sentence in Norway is 30 years.

OK I stand corrected, I thought he only got 21 years and will be out afterwards

I used to be for the death penalty, but now I feel that the death penalty is really just state-sponsored revenge. Our society has moved beyond the "eye for an eye" concept, and it's natural that feelings about the death penalty will follow.

Will Breivik get out in 21 years? It's possible that he'll convince the necessary people that he's been appropriately punished and understands why his actions were wrong, but most people believe it's unlikely. --The terms of his conviction allow him to be held longer if the State determines it is necessary.

The US needs to start looking at prisons more like Norway does - the deprivation of freedom is punishment for a crime, but we should have a duty to those who are imprisoned to help prepare them for when they are released - at that point their punishment is supposed to be over, and their crimes shouldn't continue to follow them and prevent them from being able to live like any other person.

If there were no false positives in the justice system, your argument might be reasonable. There's always a chance a person will be mistakenly given life without parole. They can be released, an executed person cannot. I guess it depends whether a) you have more trust in the justice system than evidence would support, or b) you think the false positives (dead innocents) are a reasonable price to pay.

Additionally, people can and do kill themselves in prison: there is a way out of serving a full-life sentence that doesn't involve judicial killing.

>How can a society which calls itself "civilized" keep the death penalty?

Well, what you say doesn't necessarily has to match what you are.

Hypocrisy is a thing -- and modern society is full of it.

Disappointing to find a "no true Scotsman" fallacy as the top comment.

..For those that did not know, what that means (such as myself):

No true Scotsman is an informal fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion. When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim ("no Scotsman would do such a thing"), rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule ("no true Scotsman would do such a thing"; i.e., those who perform that action are not part of our group and thus criticism of that action is not criticism of the group).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

This is not an example of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. It is instead an overt accusation that the USA is acting uncivilized with regards to this one issue, and should know better because they are otherwise civilized.

If it were an example of the mentioned fallacy, the poster would have to imply that the USA is not to be considered truly civilized. But this is not what the comment says.

It's implying, without argument, that having the death penalty somehow makes a country "uncivilized". That still counts as "no true Scotsman". "No civilized country..." etc.

I get what you're saying. You're saying the poster isn't implying that the US is not civilized, but rather that given that it is civilized, it should know better.

It still amounts to the same thing. I think you're saying it's not a "no true Scotsman" because instead of a "no true Scotsman would" it's "no true Scotsman should"? But the essence of the fallacy is that it, without argument, applies an attribute (in this case, "no death penalty") to a word ("civilized") and argues based on that unargued assertion that it isn't, or isn't acting like, that word (a Scotsman, or civilized).

Edit: I'll put it this way. Here's the OP: "How can a society which calls itself "civilized" do X?" Similar to "How can a man call himself a Scotsman if he does X?". It's implying, without argument, that X is un-Scotsman-like. It's still the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, with a different sentence structure.

The society utilizes a different definition of the word "civilized" than you do.

"The death penalty is bad" is not an a priori conclusion; unless you work it directly into the definition, it doesn't necessarily contradict "civilized society."

Why do you think Charles Manson should remain alive?

That's an individual who has gone out of their way to take the lives of multiple innocent people. Why does he get to keep what he took from others? Why do the families of the victims have to suffer him? It's not even a question of innocence.

If Manson was in any way sane, he'd realize that his actions were that of a monster. What is there to rehabilitate? If he's sane, how is living in a cell for decades not horrific punishment? A quick death would be a lot easier for everyone involved.

The death penalty is a harsh, horrible penalty. But everyone dies. I don't see how removing literal mass murderers is a detriment to society, unless we simply don't like the reality of it.

What's the alternative? Do we prefer situations like like Breivik?

In November 2012, Breivik wrote a 27-page letter of complaint to the prison authorities about the security restrictions he was being held under, claiming that the prison director personally wanted to punish him. Among his complaints were that his cell is not adequately heated and he has to wear three layers of clothing to stay warm, guards interfere with his strictly-planned daily schedule, his cell is poorly decorated and has no view, his reading lamp is inadequate, guards supervise him while he is brushing his teeth and shaving and put indirect mental pressure on him to finish quickly by tapping their feet while waiting, he is "not having candy" and he is served cold coffee, and he is strip-searched daily, sometimes by female guards. Authorities only lifted one minor restriction against Breivik; his rubber safety pen, which he described as an "almost indescribable manifestation of sadism," was replaced with an ordinary pen.[137]

In letters to foreign media outlets he told about his demands (in 2013) to prison authorities "including easier communication with the outside world and a PlayStation 3 to replace the current PlayStation 2, because it offers more suitable games"; media reported in 2014 about demands that he would starve himself to death if refused "access to a sofa and a bigger gym"; furthermore he said that "Other inmates have access to adult games while I only have the right to play less interesting kids’ games. One example is ‘Rayman Revolution,’ a game aimed at 3-year-olds," Breivik complained to prison officials."[138][139]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik

He should remain alive because it's simpler to have a general rule not to kill people. Once you start doing executions you get a bunch of innocent people killed too in practice.

That's an argument for improving our justice system, not eliminating a punishment altogether.

20 years in jail for an innocent person is no less horrible.

It's the acceptance that no justice system can be 100% perfect.

As repeated in many other comments, it gives the innocent person a chance to be released, which is better than the zero chance.

Also as you say - 20 years in jail is a serious punishment, so it isn't eliminating the punishment, it's just only using a reversible one.

It also allows for improvements in the justice system over time.

That's an argument for improving our justice system, not eliminating a punishment altogether.

Empirical evidence strongly suggests that such a reform is extremely unlikely to happen -- and that in particular, we basically will never have a system win which the false conviction rate is not simply unacceptably high. So again, the argument is to at least design for "fault-tolerance", and not impose categorically irreversible sentences in the first place.

20 years in jail for an innocent person is no less horrible.

If you were let out of jail after 20 years, I think you might disagree. But the bigger point is that the 20-year sentence can at least be appealed (and if overturned, substantially mitigated) if new evidence emerges that's relevant to your case -- as it very frequently does, in fact.

Death isn't easier. The cost of imprisoning someone for life is still less than putting them on death row.

> The cost of imprisoning someone for life is still less than putting them on death row.

That's openly because execution foes have made it so expensive to execute. Execution could be extremely cheap: lead the convict from the courtroom to the gallows, and be done with it. Imprisonment could be made to be even more expensive than execution, if there were strong-enough foes of life imprisonment (they could mandate every appeal and review that condemned men receive for those given life sentences).

'We shouldn't execute people, because it's more expensive to execute them (because we chose to make it more expensive),' is hardly a compelling argument.

Yes. Yes we do prefer to have situations where a mass shooter is in-prisoned and denied access to the latest Playstation 3. I'd rather have people like Breivik exposed for their childish behaviour in prison than to have the death penalty for them and innocent people.

> Why does he get to keep what he took from others?

If we kill him, why do we get to keep what we took from him?

Is a life spent imprisoned within a cell a more civilized punishment?

Reversible is the important bit.

A good friend of mine teaches philosophy and ethics and supports the death penalty. I'm a former prosecutor* who opposes it, but he's convinced me that people can make reasonable arguments on both sides.

I can dispassionately list some of the arguments in favor if you seriously want to know what they are, to understand the other perspective.

The arguments on both sides generally fall into three areas, utilitarian, normative, and pragmatic.

Utilitarian arguments in favor of the death penalty claim that there's a deterrent for future crimes, that essentially society must choose between the death of a murderer or the death of future victims. Responses to this argument typically question the effectiveness of deterrence. Causation here is hotly debated, there are studies on both sides, and it strikes me as generally unsettled (and likely unknowable).

The normative arguments are harder to understand, because most people today instinctively gravitate towards liberal utilitarianism.

Normative supporters of the death penalty find it grossly immoral to suggest that we should allow some extreme criminals, say someone who serially tortures, rapes, and murders children, the future enjoyment of life's pleasures.

Take an extreme. Would it be just to set aside a special palace of pleasures for such a criminal, where they can live out their days enjoying everything they like (except for torturing children to death)?

No, at least for most people, that would seem odd. (A very strict hedonic utilitarian might argue that we should provide pleasure palaces to serial killers, but such a view strongly clashes with our intuitions.)

Extrapolating, should we allow heinous criminals to enjoy the feeling of the rising sun on spring days and the smell of freshly cut grass outside the prison yards? Should we allow them to enjoy the camaraderie of fellow prisoners they meet?

Why does lavishing pleasures on them in a special palace seem so morally odd and allowing these continued pleasures of life seem ok? For the normative supporter of the death penalty, it's not. After a certain line has been crossed, certain categories of especially heinous murders, the state has an obligation to ensure the criminal no longer enjoys life's pleasures.

Another normative argument is along the lines of the "worst crimes deserve the worst punishment." When you study crime for a while, it becomes pretty apparent that some crimes are not just more intense than others, some are so heinous they belong in an entirely separate class. It seems wrong to punish them in the same way that we punish theft or assault but just for a longer time, because the spectrum of inhumanity gets so extreme. They are different in kind not just in degree, and the punishment should be different in kind as well.

Pragmatic considerations arise for a variety of reasons. There are arguments about the cost of housing a prisoner for an entire life. Cost may seem a base concern, but if the system simply ignores cost, then it will be able to process fewer criminals, which means some serial criminals go free. (Death penalty skeptics will question the cost figures, noting that the appeals process is generally lengthy and expensive.) Another consideration is the impact on victim survivors of heinous crimes, who may know that the person who murdered their family and tried to kill them would like to escape and finish the job.

If we are unable to securely hold criminals who might break free and commit more crimes that raises other pragmatic concerns. Call it the Batman rule. Even though I oppose the death penalty, I think after the Joker escapes a few times to kill more civilians, after that Batman starts to become responsible for everyone the Joker kills.

Comics provide a straw hypothetical, but you don't have to go too far before drug kingpins like El Chapo are regularly escaping or buying their way out of prisons. We don't have escapees too often in the US, but a variation on this, criminals can commit crimes while locked up. If criminals repeatedly violently attack other criminals while locked up, and if we have exhausted all other measures of control, then at a certain point we cannot either house them or let them free while ensuring the safety of others. Since the state has a duty to protect innocents, in those cases I feel like the arguments get stronger.

For me, the arguments against the death penalty that I find most compelling come from understanding the impact of the process on living victims, who have to repeatedly attend appeals. They come from biases that emerge in the system (primarily against the indigent and mentally ill). I worry about misfires in the justice system that could lead to the execution of innocents. I feel like we can accomplish similar societal goals through incarceration, and if you can choose between two options where one has less killing, I think that option is generally superior. I also worry about whether any state should have the authority to take the lives of its citizens, bit of a libertarian critique.

I think there are some very bad reasons to support and some very bad reasons to oppose the death penalty that each get used quite a lot. I get the impression most people have a strong gut reaction on one side or the other and leave it at that, never really learning about the other side.

* Note: I never tried a case that would have involved a question of the death penalty, though, for what it's worth.

There have been very few escapees from death row (e.g. from 1998 NYT article [1]):

> Martin E. Gurule, 29, became the first Death Row inmate since Floyd Hamilton, a member of the Bonnie and Clyde gang who escaped in 1934, to have successfully broken out.

This is versus the 98 that were executed in 1998 (28 in 2015). [2]

  [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/28/us/texas-death-row-inmate-pulls-off-escape.html
  [2]: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions-year

> There have been very few escapees from death row

Absolutely right. That's why I used a fictional character to introduce that line of reasoning.

That was a lead up to a key pivot though: incarcerated individuals do not need to escape to attack others (inmates or guards). Death row prisoners in California have slashed at wrists and necks of guards using homemade razors for over a decade. Tim McGhee, a self-described "thrill" killer, cut and sent two bloodied guards to the hospital in 2012. Guard Timothy Davison was beaten to death by a prisoner in Texas just last year. Two convicted murderers killed 59-year old Susan Canfield in 2007 after overpowering another guard.

Better protocols and supervision can prevent some of these. Gang-related killings inside prison walls are too common too, but there are not as many easy response options there. People need to be allowed to socialize, but once you have people in a big group, they can harm each other.

There are several no-win scenarios in running corrections facilities.

As I said in the post, I oppose the death penalty, but I wouldn't find it unreasonable or "uncivilized" as the GP put it to be moved by these concerns (albeit in certain very limited situations).

You make some very interesting points. I guess my main argument against it is that almost all other well off democracies have gotten rid of the death penalty. There are years and years of data from these countries that show that the death penalty isn't necessary.

We have a long way to go as a country and as a world. I always think about how barbaric we would look to some spacefaring race that may one day visit our planet. As it stands right now, they might very well just pave over earth for an intergalactic highway.

Civilization is mostly access to hot water, order and sanitation. And internet. Nothing precludes even torturous execution (or even mass ones) from being civilized. Human life is not that valuable no matter what we believe currently. We have 7000000000 - you could cull the herd with a billion or two and we will recoup in less than a generation.

I am not a supporter of death penalty too, but labeling everything outside of the current zeitgeist as inconceivable really hurts the cause.

That little "and internet" presupposes such a mountainous pile of infrastructure beneath it to be working that you might as well list out hundreds of things before it. You can't just throw it in there like it's an easy thing.

Some people undoubtedly deserve it and it would be better than having society pay to keep them alive.

The problem is that the death penalty can't be reversed or the person compensated if someone is found to have been wrongly convicted.

The article sort of delved into this but there are some convicts that strangely find comfort in the future of being executed. In some ways I can understand this as the thought of being in American prisons for an extended period is rather terrifying.

Michael Shermer examined this in a recent article in Scientific America [1].

I'm sad to say I don't have that many strong thoughts on the subject because as (some other commenters have posted) there are just so many other atrocities that far more concerning both quantitatively and qualitatively.

[1]: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-death-row-i...

I don't think that they find comfort in it. I think it's more they can't stop the fact that they are going to die, and want some control over the process. So they take control of how they die, not whether they die or not. And that seems like comfort.

This article unfortunately conflates the value (or absence of value) of the death penalty with the unpleasantness involved with carrying it out.

If the process were better would he still be opposed to it?

> After much contemplation, I became convinced that, on a moral level, life was either hallowed or it wasn’t. And I wanted it to be.

Also

> I could not see that execution did anything to enhance public safety.

I'm not sure he really conflates the two things any more than necessary.

The unpleasantness he describes is the result of moral doubts about killing a person who no longer poses a threat to anyone.

What he does, in my view, is to suggest that these doubts are justified and society as a whole should have those doubts as well.

In other words, he gives a human face to the agony that society should feel about this.

He isn't saying, oh the death penalty is great, but it feels so bad to administer it for some reason, so let's save ourselves the trouble, shall we?

But the average citizen might find himself looking at the death row prisoner in the eye when the said prisoner is doing the killing.

Or maybe it's their 10 year old son who's lured away by some maniac, abused and killed. It's a complicated issue, and really easy to talk about how revenge doesn't solve anything from a great distance. I could see the absence of a death penalty putting me in a situation where I would end up taking the law into my own hands. Not that I think that's okay, but I could very much see it happening in that situation.

there is 7 billion people on earth, and number is growing fast. rather than focusing on preserving quantity at all costs, which is not an issue anyway, we should focus on quality (character, added value to mankind etc.).

With this reasoning, killing a murdered of your own child (or any similar case, ie parents/loved one) isn't that much of a stretch. Extreme situations call for extreme solutions

It's a small step from what you're proposing to euthanizing "unwanted" or "unproductive" parts of the population. Are you sure you want to go down that path?

my point was only concerning the case above - somebody intentionally, even brutally kills someone closest to you.

I never suggested scaling it up to anyone else, liked or not, from where did you get that?

Oh I'm not insinuating that you do! But you do make an argument about quality of persons in the context of preserving life. That's a very dangerous path to go down.

indeed it is, but in the scenario above, rationality wouldn't be the strongest part of most humans, me including.

All this topic is ridiculous and I hope that none of us would ever be facing anything similar. But if we would, this kind of rationalization would keep at least me sane afterwards... or so I think.

It's not matter of if, but how far the US is willing to go down that path.

Does anybody have an opinion why not to use low pressure as a method killing [0]? All the failed executions by electrical chairs and administered chemicals makes me think about a safer and more human method. Just theoretical question, not advocating for anything.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw

Edit: Typo

I've thought the same. It seems like they want it to be cruel. There are clearly better options. even for lethal injection and the recent errors. Why not just morphine or heroin someone up. Rather than this paralyse then administrator more drugs that apparently hurt. There something creepy/evil about current methods.

There's a great BBC documentary with Michael Portillo on how to most humanely execute a person:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband...

Hypoxia seems the most kind way. Low pressure is not needed, just a lack of oxygen (by e.g. breathing helium). I suppose it's not enough of a punishment to go out this way, as it's rather pleasant as these things go (there's no feeling of suffocation) and there can even be a mild euphoria.

I agree that the methodology could probably be improved. If we're optimizing for psychological comfort for the prisoner and certainty of the process working, I'd actually recommend a close-range shot to the head with a high caliber bullet.

Depending on the distance and round, not only will the prisoner not experience their own death (they won't see or even hear it coming), it's astronomically unlikely to fail. High velocity rounds will pierce through the tissue more quickly than it can physically tear, and will technically exit the body before the brain matter has begun tearing. The physics of this is fascinating, because it not only ultimately destroys significant brain tissue; the process stretches out the tissue, straining and damaging the rest of the surviving brain tissue.

Of course, this is not optimized to be clean. It's gruesome, but I don't think it's necessarily cruel. One moment they're alive, the next they're not. Blunt force is still the quickest way to induce a cessation of consciousness. If the prisoner were not aware of it happening, they would probably be at greater peace at the time of their death. This could also be done remotely so as to reduce the mental toll on the executioner.

Unfortunately, it would make an open casket unlikely. But I imagine most prisoners due to be executed experience a lot of terror in the hours, days and weeks preceding their final moments under the current system. I imagine living with that anticipation is horrifying for some.

From what I can understand through cursory research, morphine is a painless way to die, so much so that doctors use it to ease patients into death when there is an acceptable lack of available treatment. Extreme euphoria followed by unconsciousness doesn't sound like a bad way to do.

It's nice to see a statement of regret, but it really bothers me how rarely those who feel this way do anything about it while in positions of power. This Warden claims to have felt it wrong in the moment, yet he did not make the faintest of sacrifices to oppose it. It would be much more influential for a well-regarded Warden to publicly oppose or resign over such policies, than to obey them blindly and issue a mea culpa years later when he no longer has influence. Read the passage below, and consider the lack of courage required to kill someone in a way you feel is pointless at best, and morally heinous at worst, because it's your "job." How many extra years of capital punishment will we have, how many extra prisoners killed, because people in his position took too long to speak up?

> Regardless of their crimes, the fact that I was now to be personally involved in their executions forced me into a deeper reckoning with my feelings about capital punishment. After much contemplation, I became convinced that, on a moral level, life was either hallowed or it wasn’t. And I wanted it to be.

> I could not see that execution did anything to enhance public safety. While death penalty supporters suggest that capital punishment has the power of deterrence, a 2012 report by the National Research Council found that research “is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases or has no effect on homicide rates.”

> I now believed that capital punishment was a dismal failure as a policy, but I was still expected to do my job. So I met with my staff and explained my position. I made it known that anyone who felt similarly opposed could back out of our assignment. According to state policy, assisting in the executions was voluntary for everyone but the superintendent. And yet each of those asked to serve chose to stay to ensure that the job was done professionally.

I disagree that it is so cut and dry. Does publicly opposing a̶n̶d̶ or resigning prevent those deaths from occurring? Should all of the staff involved be morally obligated to hand in their resignation or publicly oppose as well? What of the other prisoners under his custody that he may feel responsibility for?

Quitting or publicly opposing may be the most conspicuous way of opposing the death penalty, but people need to be able to choose their battles.

I said "publicly oppose or resign." There are many ways to protest and draw attention to things that are broken; my point isn't that he failed to do all of them, it's that he failed to do any of them.

He failed to do any that you are aware of, with regards to this single issue of many that affect his facility.

> He failed to do any that you are aware of

The whole premise of this piece is that the author went along with a broken system because "that's the way it's supposed to work" -- that people on the inside oil the machine and people on the outside look the other way, and both are to blame for their part in it.

The author bends over backwards throughout to show that he was no exception, that he went right along with it, and he seems to regret that now. If evidence to the contrary is available, I'm all ears.

> with regards to this single issue of many that affect his facility.

Well yeah, but "this single issue" is the premise of the article, a major social issue, and the topic of discussion here. I'm not saying this guy shirked his moral duties all throughout life; I'm saying he shirked them on capital punishment.

I think that had he, as warden, resigned/publicly opposed the executions they still would have happened. I think that as warden, he has many other opportunities for reform within his prison. I therefore don't think that he has a moral obligation to resign/publicly oppose the executions. We live in a society of broken systems. If we have to protest every wrongdoing that we encounter, we wouldn't be able to get anything done.

As to the warden's own lack of "the faintest sacrifice to oppose it" and "bending over backwards". What do you consider an appropriate sacrifice for an ordinary citizen who opposes capital punishment? Campaigning for more progressive political leaders? Communicating with state officials? How do you know he did none of these things? I don't have evidence that he did but neither do you have evidence that he didn't. I don't understand the condemnation of this individual you know only through an op-ed.

Public opinion is turning on capital punishment[1]. Anything those with power can do to draw attention to its failures will continue and further that momentum. Yeah, those two guys were probably going to be executed either way, but he could have impacted others by accelerating the pace of reform. Similar impact has been made elsewhere in the last decade, in states like Illinois where moratoriums have been imposed when officials and governors have come to their senses before the lawmakers.

In terms of what an appropriate sacrifice is, I suppose there's a pretty wide spectrum. At the extreme, he could've publicly resigned and refused to have any part in something so unethical. On the lighter end, he could've penned an op/ed stating that it's a terrible practice but that he's going to stay and do his part to make it as comfortable as possible for the condemned, while calling on lawmakers to end the practice. I'm not prescriptive about how exactly people should react when their ethics are challenged, but I think it's reasonable to ask them to wander in the direction of their moral compass even when their job points the other way.[2]

[1] http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/16/less-support-for-deat...

[2] Obviously, some people would be hurting for work if they lost their job, and cannot afford to take big risks or piss off their bosses. But that doesn't apply to prison wardens, and if anything, the imperative of a prison warden to have solid ethics is much higher than that of a typical worker.

on the subject of deterrence, if the author argues that the death penalty is not a deterrence, how does he explain the relatively low levels of drug crimes in asian countries where death penalty is more heavily used? It appears to me the death penalty, while used as a potential punishment threat in the U.S, is actually a sparsely applied. Criminals know that, so its deterrence factor is effectively diminished

The US has the death penalty, they have the death penalty, why would one conclude that the death penalty is what makes the difference?

even if a country with a harsh penalty for drugs has less drug crime, other confounding factors have to be looked at, like a large potential market for illegal drugs, a large population with no better means of making a living.

I would expect that a draconian death penalty may be some deterrent but it may not be the best policy, either.

You may be confusing the metric of convictions with the metric of activity (proxy for deterrence)

The way it works in the USA for example, is if the punishment for cocaine dealing is draconian, for white people it'll be plea bargained down to time served and some probation for a small possession charge, but black people will get convicted and go to prison on a full trafficking and conspiracy charge, so the metric you're actually measuring is the racial ratio of coke dealers caught by the cops.

Likewise what you're likely really measuring in the Asian countries is the ratio of border guards and cops who can be bought off and stay bought off. There may be some occasional extremely aggressive bribe negotiation situations, or a much disliked or distrusted courier is ratted out by his own guys (or an opposing group?). Another metric that's actually being measured is the local technologies and ratios of shipments; its quite possible that things in the USA are extremely personal with trunks full of stuff in personally owned vehicles but in Asia anonymous shipping containers in government owned and operated ports that don't legally exist are the primary source or maybe something even sneakier.

Drug abuse is far less common in Singapore, to take one example, than Western countries. That would suggest low activity.

Essential reading on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

The opening I will never forget. It is a detailed historical description of one of the last public executions in France for Regicide. A powerful opening to a very thought provoking book. It details the decline of capital punishment as the public began to see the punishment as worse than the crime, and the moving from the taking of life by the state (execution), to the taking of bodily freedom (imprisonment). From punishing the soul of the man, to merely punishing his body.

After reading the book I became sure that this trend in the reform of punishment will continue and that it is inevitable that eventually capital punishment will disappear completely from the world.

The video "Hanging with Frank" covers the details of the process the UK used to use:

https://vimeo.com/24804876

You could make a general case that the government shouldn't kill anyone unless it's obviously beneficial to do so. That would rule out capital punishment since imprisonment works ok, would allow for killing armed attackers in self defence and probably for assisted dying for the terminally ill. It gets more tricky with regime change and the like but you could make a case for opposing the Saddams and Assads financially rather than with bombs.

Do we actually have numbers that shows death penalty actually impacts criminality rates? Why put any emotional stuff (revenge, punishment, suffering) in the equation?

While it may not serve as a deterrent, in my opinion there are people that have performed actions so heinous and grizzly that they should not be allowed to live. The death penalty should be reserved for only the most depraved and irredeemable members of society.

If you don't agree, how about an opposing viewpoint instead of downvotes?

Many people have been proven innocent after they were on death row.

If there is any question of guilt, then the death penalty would not be an appropriate sentence. There are many examples where there is no question of guilt, where I feel the death penalty would be completely appropriate. Admitted serial killers for example. I'm not advocating a liberal use of the death sentence, but I still feel that there are cases where it's needed. If anyone doesn't agree, make an argument instead of downvoting. HN is better than that.

> Admitted serial killers for example.

Like this man? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sture_Bergwall

"With no eyewitnesses or technical forensic evidence to connect him to the crimes..."

So no, not like that at all.

He was at one point convicted of eight murders, and had confessed to more than 20 more. Who, if not that man, would you nominate for a death penalty? Or is a conviction not a conviction?

I'm thinking more along the lines of a Jeffery Dahmer. There was overwhelming forensic evidence of guilt, along with full confessions. In that case, guilt was all but irrefutable. I've yet to hear an argument as to why someone like that, and under those circumstances, should be allowed to remain alive.

I submit that allowing such unrepentant and irredeemable evil to exist is more barbaric than a quick death.

You still have not clearly defined how you would differentiate between the two cases. Both were convicted, with forensic evidence, and had confessed, to multiple murders. If a conviction is not enough, what would be?

I'm not a lawyer or a legislator. I don't have the legal wherewithal to know exactly how to word a potential codification of death penalty requirements based on a large amount of forensic evidence and a confession. It doesn't change my opinion that there are some people (in extremely rare cases) that should lose their lives.

For what it's worth, the article you cited states that there was a lack of technical forensic evidence, which was not a problem in the Dahmer case.

So what you seem to be saying is that the death penalty is only for when we’re really, really sure that the person is guilty. The problem is, we already have such a thing, and we call it a conviction in court. This is already only supposed to happen when we’re really, really sure of a person’s guilt. What you are proposing is some sort of “super-conviction”, and the question of where to draw the line between the two forms of conviction, and how they should be defined, becomes extremly subjective. Until you have some concrete objective measures which can stand up to legislative scrutiny, I doubt the possibility of even doing such a thing.

There's guilty, where you have evidence that points to a suspects guilt, and then there's (for example) "I did this thing in full view of 100 people and cameras" guilty. That's already pretty big difference between levels of assurance of guilt.

As I said before, I can't come up with legal, concrete, and objective measures because I haven't studied law. It's completely unreasonable for you to ask that. Furthermore, as a taxpayer and regular voter, I help fund and choose the people that have said training. It's up to them to figure out how to implement a solution. I can't be expected to do everything.

I don't understand this insistence on inflicting the death penalty on murderers. Given that a prison sentence is somewhat similar to being kidnapped, should it be reserved to kidnappers only?

If we admit that the death penalty is a penalty like any other, then why should it be applied to murderers, who by the way are often poor, deranged or sick people, with troubled or violent upbringing, low IQs and levels of instruction? Why don't apply it to affluent and powerful people who screwed whole nations from the comfort of their offices' chairs, like for example George W. Bush and Colin Powell?

I'm not advocating the death penalty in crimes of passion of even simple murder. I'm advocating for the death penalty for the "monsters" of the world such as Jeffrey Dahmer.

I thought that there there was consensus amomg statitians that the death penalty has a deterrent effect and each execution saves between 3 and 18 lives:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/us/18deter.html

While there was still people who were challenging the studies the statisticians had moved on because it was considered a settled question.

Interesting. I've only ever seen studies suggesting that the death penalty has no deterrent effect whatsoever (when compared to penal systems without death penalty).

Have an upvote. Imo, there is no point having a discussion on a contentious issue if well written comments are downvoted into oblivion just because they are on the 'wrong' side of the issue.

I think many arguments on the death penalty come down to debates about which actions are grizzly or heinous enough and what standard of proof is sufficient. The latter seems to be the one folks seem to have the larger issue with. There are numerous instances of an overzealous or corrupt legal system deciding someone is expendable in order to close a case, advance a career, etc.

I'm curious about the intersection of two policies that each seem to be gaining momentum:

1) Discouraging the death penalty

2) Encouraging "end of life" options for the terminally ill

Should an inmate serving life without parole have the option of voluntarily ending their own life?

>During a prisoner’s final days, staff members keep the condemned person under 24-hour surveillance to, among other things, ensure that he doesn’t harm or kill himself, thus depriving the people of Oregon of the right to do the same.

I wonder what happens if a death row inmate keeps yelling and fighting. Do they sedate him?

That would be a deterrent for those officers, having to handle inmates who won't consent to their own death.

On a purely moral level, I think capital punishment for murderers and traitors is absolutely justified. You, who have stolen a man's most precious possession, his life, shall not enjoy the rest of your own. You, who have betrayed our nation and our security, will never again enjoy our protection.

But in its practicalities, the chance for wrongful conviction, the cost to society, the anguish it causes the executioners, and the potential for abuse, I see many good reasons for abolition.

> You, who have betrayed your nation and its security, will never again enjoy its protection.

Which can also be accomplished by exile instead of killing.

The world ran out of Australias to send people to.

That might be an interesting venue for space travel. Gather a bunch of convicts sentenced to exile, put them in a space ship where they can sustain themselves for the rest of their life [1], and send the ship onto a locked course into outer space.

[1] At least in theory. In practice, a society of convicts will likely not hold up very long.

Retribution is a legitimate end of justice. Aside from the practical impossibility of exile as punishment in the modern world, I don't think exile fits the gravity of the crime of treason.

So I'm curious, then, about how you understand, say, life sentences? Aren't those effectively "death sentences" where men or women are effective paid to live the rest of their lives inside of the prison system—but with no chance to ever rejoin society? They know what exists outside but are doomed to live perhaps 30-60 years in prison cut off from family?

Personally, I think we'd be better off getting rid of life sentences.

"rejoin society"

Only slightly derailing the conversation to point out that at current numbers and extrapolating some trends pretty soon the majority experience for some subgroups will be to have served some time in prison.

At that point where society = ex con for some small enough local value of society, I don't think doing time like everyone else is going to involve any problem rejoining society, when everyone in your society did time.

I mean, sure the odds of going to Stanford just dropped from 0.0001% to 0% which is very exciting for the theoretical 0.0001% person, but what kind of cultural influence can that possibly be for everyone else on either side given those numbers?

Perhaps you misunderstood my comment. I meant that why do we pay for people to spend the rest of their natural lives in prison with no chance to live a "normal"—go to school, have a career, start a family, provide for themselves—life?

I can't even begin to imagine the anguish that taking another human's life in that manner would cause me.

While death penalty supporters suggest that capital punishment has the power of deterrence, a 2012 report by the National Research Council found that research “is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases or has no effect on homicide rates.”

Put deterrence aside for a moment. Let's talk about the cost of keeping guilty murderers alive in prison for the remainder of their lives. Is it worth it?

Are you talking about the financial cost? Due to the extra precautions around death row (including things like a more extensive appeals process and more security), it costs more to keep someone on death row and then execute them than it does to keep them in prison for life without parole.

I'm not saying that this is the argument to use for abolishing the death penalty, but it's definitely not one for keeping it as it currently stands.

You're pushing into a direction you might not like. Should we start executing people that aren't positively contributing to the society (disabled, sick..)?

I think the decision between life and death shouldn't be made based on cost.

> Is [keeping "guilty murderers alive in prison"] worth it?

In many cases, guilt is not certain, only proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Lifetime imprisonment can be reversed if a mistake is realized, but death can't.

Even given a hypothetical case where the evidence is so damning and guilt is fairly concrete, the execution of another human should be a punishment reserved for when we have no other option.

The cost wouldn't be substantially more than it is today if only because capital murder trials are rare occurrences these days, and its even rarer when the death penalty is given. Death row inmates stay on death row for a long time, so while its not effectively a life sentence, the state still has to keep them alive.

The progress of civilization towards an increasingly better society requires cost and effort.

Either you consider human life a fundamental value, or you do not. There are no final answers in this mysterious, apparently indifferent universe, but there is a lot of empirical data. Over and over, cultures that place a high value on human life lead to the societies where the most people prefer to live.

Another issue is that an old religious superstition survives even among atheists/agnostics, because it is disguised as a philosophical concept. This superstition is called "free will". Some people are born with problematic brains, others are raised in environments where they never have the chance to develop a healthy mind. Does society have to protect itself from these people? Absolutely. Do we want to live in a society that decides to kill them because it is more economically effective? I don't.

Yet another issue is that of certainty. It is never possible to be 100% certain that someone is guilty. Even if they confess, even if there is video evidence. There is always a tiny probability that there is something fundamental that we are missing. A culture that place a very high value on human life will not be willing to take this chance.

Consider also that, in the EU, not only is there no death penalty but not even life sentences. Typically, the harshest sentence you can get is 20-something years, no matter how terrible your crime. And yet, there is less violent crime in the EU than in the US. EU countries spend much less resources in keeping people incarcerated than the US. Why do you think that is?

> This superstition is called "free will". Some people are born with problematic brains, others are raised in environments where they never have the chance to develop a healthy mind.

How can you know that what you're saying is not a superstition itself?

Because I have never seen a coherent definition of what "free will" is supposed to mean, let alone how to empirically test for its existence. What is this "will" free from? The workings of the brain? If that is the case, then we are talking about the supernatural. If not, then we know that the brain develops according to genetic instructions and the environment, and we also know that both these things can go wrong by no fault of the person.

I suggest reading http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill for a pretty good overview of the arguments in favor of the existence of "free will" (which itself has many definitions).

Which isn't to say you're wrong, but I think it's pretty uncharitable to say there aren't any "coherent" arguments in favor of free will. You did say you haven't "seen" any arguments, which I suppose is not the same as a claim that are none, but a cursory glance at that article should be illuminating for you. People have been thinking about this for a very long time, and no consensus seems to have emerged. :-)

You might also be interested in http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative, which seems to fit what little you've said about your current thinking.

I was not referring to the "free will" part, but the hypothesis stated thereafter, in the remainder of my quote.

Speeding things up would only make it worse for all of the wrongly convicted. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-list-those-freed-d...

Yeah, I don't think that's the case. If you look at justice systems all over the world, you will see that countries with harshest punishments usually don't enjoy a low crime rate. I'd say it's quite the opposite.

I think poverty correlates both with a high crime rate and harsh punishments.

Misery is a very well used form of slow painful execution, why do people wish to use more flashy forms that are counterproductive in keeping our systems so perfect?

The poor needs to fear the wealthy in order to not disrupt a perfect society that have proven being an example of progress, humanitarian values and eco-friendly system.

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